Bush Mackel

Unbelievably, only days after submitting a reinclusion request to Google, I rechecked my PageRank and am showing a healthy PR of 3! Honestly, I don’t know if this is going to mean much for my site and blog monetization going forward, but it was on my list of things to take care of “now that I’m back”, and I’m very happy it’s all done.

If you’re in the same place I was in, feel free to check out this post from Matt Cutts: and it wouldn’t hurt to also look at this one from the always supportive Andy Beard! Oh, and in the event that you DON’T want to read those posts, here’s the summary on how to remedy this problem:

• Remove yourself from paid links on your site.
• Take down your paid links or nofollow them.
• Think about removing those paid link pages entirely.
• Think about removing the code on your site linking to paid link companies.
• Go to the Dashboard in Google Sitemaps and click the link on the right that reads, “Request Reinclusion”.
• Tell Google you’re sorry, what you did, what you did to fix it, and why it will never happen again.
• Give me a high five.

Lately, I’ve really felt like that. I’ve had so many things going on but surprisingly, I’ve actually been doing a good job with taking care of them. Well… Except for blogging. But then again, what else is new. (#):)

Venture Numero Uno
So I know you’re wondering what I’ve been up to and I wish I could say. But the funny thing is… When you’re trying to make it in different ventures and trying to convince others to give you large sums of money… Well, you have to watch what you say and where you say it so that you don’t damage the brand you’re trying to create. Make sense? I guess I learned this sentiment when I was actively practicing Real Estate and maybe I can present it another way just to drive the point home… While I know what I’m doing (I get paid very well at my 9-5 to do it), have been doing it for years, (about 15 years), and speak very well… Many potential suitors will forget those things when they see that I’m relatively young, don’t have an office, and haven’t been “in business” for that long. You know what I mean? It’s always the chicken and the egg thing… You can’t get business unless you’ve already done business.

But don’t think that I’m complaining about my situation. These last two weeks have been really hard but I’m out there doing the justice, creating some great work, and at the very least putting together a solid foundation for tomorrow and future clients. And at the risk of counting my eggs before they’re hatched, I think I’m probably going to get at least one sale out of everything. So BANGARANG.

Venture Numero Dos
So I have another venture I’m working on too that I’m keeping the wraps on. That’s one that I’m REALLY excited about and have started some preliminary work on as well. I won’t say much at this point just that it deals with affiliate marketing, is a great idea (if I say so myself), and I owe the idea to my favourite radio show. I know this post isn’t really entertaining since I’m heavily censoring myself, but at least with this one you’ll hear more sooner rather than later. Maybe in time this blog will turn out to be like Bob Parson’s of GoDaddy where I can finally take ownership of all this stuff and not have to be so clandestine about everything.

Something I CAN Talk About
One of the things that I started working on again was Learn Stuff Online! It’s my project that will never die!!! Honestly, it could’ve very well gone away but then I was looking at my earnings for Bush Mackel off of AdSense and I’m nearing like $10 a month on passive income! I know that’s not much for a LOT of people out there, but for me that’s really cool. ESPECIALLY since I don’t do much on this site to target specific targets or keywords. So after I saw that, I thought that I should really work on Home Theater How To @ LSO and maybe it would start paying off by the end of the year. Now not surprisingly, I’ve been slacking on THAT like I have on this blog but maybe now that things are returning to normal as far as my busyness is concerned I can really get on there and get my posting frequency back up!

My Super Slow Computer
My desktop at home is slower than molasses. The fact that I blew out the BIOS a while back while overclocking my rig doesn’t help the problem either. In a nutshell, my one SATA drive that has all my stuff needs to be re-formatted. Even with ad-aware, anti-virus and defrags, sometimes you just need to do it. Well, it seems like I couldn’t reformat it so instead I took it out and tried to start fresh with a good ol’ ATA drive. That worked like a charm and now I can actually run “msconfig” and install SP3 (which I couldn’t do before). Now I’m in the process of getting everything I need from the old drive to the new one. And then maybe I can work on the SATA drive again but currently I can’t select boot order so if I have both drives in, the SATA drive also gets priority blah blah blah

And Now the Miscellaneous
Well I took sometime this afternoon (or yesterday afternoon by the time you read this) to make some small changes to this site. I tell ya, small changes can do wonders as I really couldn’t STAND looking at this site for more than a minute. Still has a ways to go, but at least I can stomach it. What do you think? Can anyone notice the differences?

And last LAST night the wife helped me reverse the way my desk is built and in my house, it really lends itself well to its space now… Boring I know, but it’s one of those changes that you can just “breathe out” about. Everything feels just so much better now… Like I can breathe. Plus, I threw out a lot of stuff that was clogging up my desk so working on it now just feels great.

And aside from all that, I’m also doing decently well with Physical Therapy and Allergy Shots. Yeah, you didn’t even know I was doing that stuff right? Well normally I don’t have an opportunity to do it with my 45 minute commute to work and all, but it got to a place with my feet/knees and allergies that I had to make a change and start focusing on ME again. Admittedly, I don’t know how long I’m going to be able to keep it up with my 9 to 5 but here’s hoping it’s a while longer.

Finally, I don’t remember the last time I turned on my 360 was. My bulb just went in my projector, and I pretty much refuse to play games anywhere but my basement. AND I just re-did my home theater cabinet too!! ARGH! You know what the last straw was? My wife brought her family over and put on Twilight. That movie has clearly ruined my life. Ok, well I’ve written enough here to cover 5 posts from me so hope you enjoyed it and thanks for all the follows on Twitter! Any bets as to whether its up or not right now?

You know, I really have to change the way this blog looks. Of course I don’t have the time to do it, but it so needs to be done. But that’s a side note…

So OBVIOUSLY I haven’t been around much lately and that’s because outside of me always “going away” for the holidays, I’ve been working really hard in my main side venture to get new business and set it up for an idiom of success in the new year.

In 2008 I’ve been rather unsuccessful but hopefully…

Pushin - Every Day and Night
That will change going forward as I have some big marketing/advertising plans in store for my company. And lemme tell you, for someone with my modest means, I’m certainly taking risk going for it, especially in this terrible US economy where no one seems to want to spend money. Don’t you wish you sometimes had a time machine so you could make sure everything turned out ok before you took the big plunge? Though, I guess if I didn’t like the trill of this stuff I’d be fine doing the ol’ day-in-day-out boring stuff instead of trying to plow a new life for myself.

Anyone else have any big plans for 2009?

What does it say when it takes you three times to log into the admin section of your blog? My guess is that you need to be posting more. (#):)

Well hopefully with 2009, I’ll have the chance to do that though I’m not sure if it will ultimately be possible. Don’t get me wrong, I want to. I REALLY want to…

But with the wife going back to finish her last year of Physician’s School this monday, and the kids getting older, PLUS me still working an hour+ from home and putting a lot of attention into my other endeavor..

Obviously it gets hard to find the time. (#):)

But I’m hopeful I can turn things around. Besides, if Pete was able to come back from the closing shop mentality, I should be able to sojourn through this busy patch right?

Well anyway, I hope that everyone is having a great New Years and thanks to all the wonderful people who wished me Merry Christmas, can’t wait to catch up with everyone in 2009!

Thanks to everyone who said hello during my Hot Fire Quick Update and those who sent their congrats on the birth of the new kid.

So now that the dust has settled somewhat, I just wanted to give a bigger update on where I’ve been lately, what I’ve been doing and where my head’s been at.

Obviously, the biggest thing that has happened as the birth of our new kid Dart. And with the one we have already, things have been quite hectic at home. But I think we’re starting to transition out of that period where we’re just dealing and finally starting to live again. And compounding all of that is the other big thing which was finally moving into our new house.

La Nueva Casa
Now I’ve never had a house before. I’ve never moved INTO a new house before. It’s like from the day that we packed up till oh…. Right about now, our life has just been a whirlwind. We packed up on basically one day, and we moved in the next. And after we got into the new house, it seems it has been nothing but buying and building Ikea furniture after I get home everyday from my 7am-7pm job. *ugh*

The Daily Grind
I’m sure some of you have that commute and can thus attest to how sucky it is. Basically that commute gives you just enough time to go to sleep before you have to get up the next day and do it all over again. In regards to the family : It sucks beyond belief. When I get home in the evening, all I want to do is just relax for an hour since I’ve been driving on the road for 3 hours (1 1/2 there, 1 1/2 back). But if I relax for an hour, it’s time for the kids and wife to go to sleep which equates to no family time. But you know what?… At least I have a job. And hopefully this’ll just make me work harder to get out of it so I can spend time with the fam.

New Projects
Now with things starting to settle down (in the sense that I’m finally getting back into a daily routine), I’m hoping that I’ll be back to blogging more frequently. I’ve really missed blogging, and coming back will be a lot of fun. Now I don’t know that I’m going to be able to do 5 times a week, but at least for the foreseeable future, if I can do MWF, I’ll be very very happy. I also want to focus on my AdSense/Affiliate sites and start to really pour some effort into them.

And on top of that - I MAY have mentioned it on here, but the newest hotness at home is my new home theater setup! We’re talking about me building a media enclosure out of my wall, dry walling, new receivers, a projector… It’s kinda SERIOUS! Obviously, you’ll be hearing about that in the upcoming days as well.

Thanks for Keeping Up!
Finally, I just wanted to thank everyone again for keeping me in your RSS feeds and waiting for me to once again get my act together. Can’t wait to talk to y’all some more on your sites and on this one!

Well this is certainly becoming quite a productive day.

So far I’ve managed to get some laundry done, hang out with the family, AND upgrade Wordpress.

I will say though -

The admin environment for 2.5 is certainly going to take some getting used to but I’m sure the updates to the codebase will win me over soon enough.

You kids out there like 2.5?

Well it looks like Wordpress is acting a bit wonky on me and that often means it’s time to update.

So hopefully over the course of today I’ll have a minute to give my blog a little TLC. Oh, and one of the wonky things seems to be that I can’t reply to comments at the moment. Anyone else having problems like that?

I’ve once again hit a patch of pretty busy things for myself, and thankfully this time around it looks like those things are definitely of the positive sort.

And I’m beginning to come out of them now so I think it’s time to throw some updates up on here. Well actually… Now that I write that, I don’t know if I’m really coming out of them as much as I’m starting to see the proverbial light at the end of tunnel.

The big things on the hit list are of course the impending house purchase, finally finishing up that pesky website I’ve mentioned on here, Little Mac’s 1st birthday party, getting more business for my design company, and learning ColdFusion *bleh* at work. Why don’t we go in order of stress shall we?

Getting More Business for BWD 0 stress
Right now, my business Bethesda Web Design is doing just the right amount of business for me right now which isn’t too much. (#):) As I’ll point out in a hot minute, I’m putting the finishing touches of the company’s first real client site and I’ve had another person inquire about a new website too which I have a good feeling on. But probably the biggest thumbs up for the company in the past month was getting an old client back on board which means my hosting costs are no longer dragging me down to nearly the extent as they were before.

Finishing Up That Pesky Website 2 stress
This used to rank much higher on the stressful scale but I’ve recently put a lot of work into it addressing the harder parts of the service, and finishing up some nagging issues that I personally had a problem with. NOW the only thing I’m really waiting on is the “client” to get back to me with the rest of the text so I can put the seal of completeness on this one. And don’t worry, I’ll be talking a lot more about this project next week in a Postmordem of sorts.

Little Mac’s 1st Birthday Party 3 stress
I’ll admit it that from jump, I didn’t want to have a birthday party for the little guy. He’s not going to remember it and it’s just going to mean a lot of time commitment from me along with the whole catering thing *rolling eyes*. BUT the wife really wanted to have it so here I am, having to fire up the BarBQ (which NEVER goes smoothly) and having to figure out what food I’m going to make to feed all these people that are allegedly coming. bleh

Learning ColdFusion 4 stress
It should come as a surprise to no one that I’m more familiar with PHP for database manipulation than anything else. (See wordpress). But when I was originally propositioned at work to learn this technology I of course agreed and now I really wish I was doing something else. Of course it doesn’t help that I’m basically learning as I’m going through the joy that is the Internet Tutorial, but it really feels like ColdFusion is forcing me to learn a new scripting language that is just different enough from most standards that I have to stop and look everything up every 5 seconds. And as there’s basically only one other guy in the office with CF experience, I bet I’m gonna have to start doing this a lot more in the future.

Impending House Purchase ? stress
And finally on the pain train is the impending house purchase for which I have settlement on Monday. For some reason, it’s really not stressing me out as much as it should be. Maybe it’s the fact that I probably won’t be moving in ’till Sept or that I’m ok paying copious amounts in the way of bills. One thing is for certain though and that’s that I have very limited time to renew my real estate license if I’m going to be able to get a referral fee off the purchase. Busy weekend for sure coming up. (#):)

Anyone out there doing anything of interest?

You know, when you’ve been out of the blogging game for as long as I have - You can’t even figure out what you’re going to title your posts.

I’m SO sorry that I have basically dropped off the face of the blogging world but lately I haven’t been able to find anytime to write a half way decent post. (See this one for example). And because I haven’t been able to write anything half way decent, I’ve just kinda…

Stopped writing. (#):(

Why I’m Not Writing
I’ve been thinking about this one a lot and while there are a ton of reasons, I think the biggest one is that I’d like to think that my posts have always been of pretty good quality. (Or so I’d like to believe anyway). I know I’ve said it before, but when I write posts, I tend to have my posts blocked out for the entire week and when I start one I’ll write a draft, revise it sometime later and then finally eventually post it with some pictures when I think it’s pretty good.

With how my time has been lately, I just don’t have the time to do that, and at the beginning I just thought it’d be ok because I’d eventually find the time to post some quality stuff. But I haven’t. And then after that I didn’t want to just occasionally pop on to the blogosphere with a random post here and there I mean, usually I’m writing 5 posts a week. That’s what I’m supposed to do right?

Why is this Blog Here?
The easiest and truest answer is that I like talking to people about my common interests. But in its current form, Bush Mackel exists to discuss technology, video games, blogging etc… Now that doesn’t mean that the “truest answer” and the “current form” of the site are contradictions of each other but somewhere along the way I started blogging with a very professional mindset. Which is GREAT don’t get me wrong, but at the same time I think I started imposing a lot of standards on this place which I tried to adhere too. The problem with it now is that I don’t honestly believe I can still blog regularly and live up to these standards.

So What Do I Do?
I don’t know. I miss blogging. I want to blog. But I don’t know that I have the time TO blog anymore, at least not in the capacity that I was. And a lot of that DOES have to do with my job which is very different than the one I had before it. This job pretty much takes up all of my time and the people here are a lot more friendly than at my last so there’s always someone over my shoulder which means it is a STRUGGLE to try and blog from work.

Plus, it doesn’t help that outside of having to show up and the 45 minute commute on both ends, I really don’t mind my job. It pays very well, the people are good and the projects are interesting. Now if my blog were making enough for me to live on, we obviously wouldn’t be having this conversation but the truth of the matter is that it is not and I don’t know that it would anytime soon w/o me spending a LOT of time on it.

Conclusion?
If you’re looking for a conclusion to this, you’ll have to look elsewhere because I don’t have it. I remember when I brought all this up in the past, someone said they understood me taking sometime away from my blog because “work comes first”. That statement stuck with me because if you get to know me, you’d understand that that statement really bothers me. Well, let me say this - Work coming first over my blog wouldn’t bother me. My 9-5 over my blog does. I could go on and on on this point but if you’ve read this blog for a while, you probably understand what I’m saying. Thankfully, even though I haven’t been working on my blog I have been working on my design company and I think it’s coming along nicely. Hopefully soon I’ll have my first client too.

But yeah, I just don’t know what’s going to happen to this blog. I’m sure it will continue but I’m not sure when and I’m not sure how. It’s killing me that I can’t find the time to update it, but I don’t know that I can find the time. I just don’t know.

Yikes this has been a busy week!

My apologies that I haven’t gotten any posts up lately, but I’ve kinda taken a step back from blogging this week so I could put some serious effort into getting my web design project off the ground.

Don’t be misled though by my use of the word “project”. I really should call refer to it as my business since well…

It literally is that.

I’ll of course give some more information on the whole process when I can, but I will say that over the past two weeks or so, I was kinda inspired by NBC’s The Apprentice to redesign its homepage, mission statement (as it were) and also my plan of attack (marketing) on the whole thing.

And while I absolutely hate to have had to backoff blogging, there’s really only so much I can do in a week with the new job and unfortunately, I really had to make the web design stuff a priority. It’s one of those things (and I think I’ve mentioned this before) where the initial ramp up takes a lot of effort but after that, the whole thing isn’t too bad. In my case, I pretty much started from scratch this past week – Redesigning the website, complicating my design, and just making a lot of work for myself.

But in any event, things are getting done that need to get done so I’m obviously very happy about that, and hopefully all this work I’m putting into the business will pay off really soon. Thanks for always being patient with me guys!